On 29 June 2007, people gathered outside the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue in New York to buy a phone that was not yet on sale. It was the launch day of the original iPhone. Reuters photographed the crowd waiting for the 6 p.m. opening and recorded the first customer being admitted. Before anyone could carry the new device out of the shop, a very old mechanism was deciding who would get one first: a line at the door.
The phone did not have the physical keyboard familiar on many handsets of the time. Its touchscreen promised a different way to use music, the web and a mobile telephone in one object. Apple’s announcement the previous day said that its 164 US retail stores would begin selling at 6 p.m. local time, on a first-come, first-served basis, with a limit of two per customer. The 4GB model cost $499; the 8GB model, $599. Whatever the advertising said about the future, access to it was governed by a store opening hour and the order in which people arrived.
The wait became news in its own right. Photographers turned their lenses toward the pavement and the store entrance; customers were celebrating a device they had not yet had the chance to use. The surviving coverage cannot tell us that everybody in the queue wanted the same thing. Some may have been eager to use the phone, others to take part in a widely watched launch, and others to obtain a scarce early purchase. What is documented is the remarkable public spectacle of waiting before the product itself reached the street.
It is tempting to describe the day as the instant the future arrived. But even an innovation presented as a break with the past had a price tag, a release schedule and a place in line. To reach a new kind of interface, people used the most familiar interface of all: the space behind the person ahead of them.
For the first iPhone, the order of purchase became part of the news. Customers occupied public space until the 6 p.m. release for a device they had never used. The value of owning the product was joined by the value of being among the first.
Reuters identifies the moment on 29 June 2007 when the first iPhone customer entered Apple’s Fifth Avenue store for the 6 p.m. launch. Because the release time was shared to the minute, days of waiting became a line before a performance, set in motion all at once.